Titanic food is today's main course, and for dessert: a cover reveal of my next book, Bake Offed. This month marks the 110th anniversary of the Titanic voyage. We know what the passengers ate on the ship because a few survivors had souvenir menus in their pockets.
The largest group of passengers were in third class. Less than a quarter of them survived. On most ships of that era, third-class passengers had to bring food with them for the voyage. On the Titanic, they were served meals at long tables in a room resembling a school cafeteria. Dinner was in the middle of the day, as was common among the working classes. The food served at evening tea resembled our lunch, and supper was a late snack.
Notice the gruel on the supper menu, a dish with a bad reputation. Dickens presents it as the meager fare of starving children in Oliver Twist and the cheap meal of the miserly Scrooge. Basically, it’s a thin porridge. Besides water and oatmeal, a recipe from a 1747 cookbook lists lemon peel, mace, currants, nutmeg, sugar, and white wine as ingredients. That kind of gruel doesn’t sound too cruel.
Passengers in the 1st and 2nd classes on the Titanic ate more sumptuous meals. Here's the dinner served in 2nd class a few hours before the ship hit an iceberg.
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I researched meals on the Titanic to write my 5th Five-Ingredient Mystery, S'more Murders. In the book a Titanic-obsessed yacht owner hires my sleuth Val and her grandfather to re-create the last meal served on that doomed ship. Not just a catering gig with really bad karma, it's the final meal for one person on the yacht.
GIVEAWAY: Leave a comment on yesterday’s post for a chance to win S'more Murders and five other books.
Read the first chapter of S'more Murders and find buy links on the Kensington Books site.
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Now for the cover reveal!
Join Val Deniston and her grandfather at the Maryland Mystery Fan Fest, where there's a bake-off that makes “killing competition” take on a whole new meaning. When the Deadly Desserts bake-off lives up to its name, Val and Granddad turn up the heat on a killer. . .
The Mystery Fan Fest sounds like exactly the fun getaway cafe manager Val and her grandfather could use. Granddad will even compete in a bake-off in which contestants assume the roles of cooks to famous fictional sleuths. Playing Nero Wolfe’s gourmet cook Fritz is a challenge for Granddad. He’s steamed to learn who will be playing Sherlock Holmes’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson—his nemesis Cynthia Sweet, who he believes ripped off his five-ingredient theme from his column “Codger Cook” to use in her own recipe column.
He isn’t the only one who has a beef with his not-so-sweet competitor. When she's found dead after receiving an anonymous warning, it’s up to Val and her grandfather to find out which of the mystery fans was no fan of Cynthia.
See a list of sites where you can pre-order Bake Offed.
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I'd enjoy reading your comments on Titanic food or the book cover.
Love the cover on "Bake Offed" from the delicious looking offerings to the stack of books and the evidence tape. On my TBR list and can't wait for the opportunity to read it.
ReplyDeleteFun seeing the menus from the Titanic. I would most definitely fair better in 2nd class. :)
2clowns at arkansas dot net
Cute touches on the cover with the murder weapons in the icing.
ReplyDeleteThe third class menu is surprisingly good sounding.